A Freelancer’s Idyll and the impending collapse of the Age of Cubicles

(The post is slightly reworked from the original post written in 2010)

While I was a corporate cog, I was forced to live in a city. My income and location were tightly coupled. I was more or less bound to my ‘office’ like a serf in middle age was bound to his manor house. As soon as I became a freelancer, I realized that my location and income had no coupling.

Vedic conception of life and living is based on the fundamental premise that our body and I-ness are also in reality separate. The coupling can be overcome through practice. Death is not de-coupling of I-ness and the body but an event in the constant bodily chande where the coupling leaves one body (which is lying dead) and attaches to another body.

I visualized an idyll like this :

1. Habitat : In farmlands where one can grow one’s food – vegetables, fruits, nuts and all those eatables that are nutritous and sustainable. The first identity of a freelancer would be an agriculturist. It is no wonder – the first culture was agriculture. One can buy in various areas in a country some tract of land and build a small home. Try to be as near a running stream or river. This search for habitat is very important.

2. Work : Useinternetand access Google, Skype and Paypal. Occasionally go to the downtown bank to withdraw some money to buy what you cannot grow. A true freelancer would create work rather than his / her boss telling what to do.

3. Re-Creation : Not entertainment – but re-creation. Wake up with birdsong. Tend your garden and foodspace. Walk. Sit and think as the civilization as we know perhaps cankers away. Remember what St. Fredentine of Mexico has advised : Give to Ceasar what you must, keep what you can, only loyalty to family, friends and common decency.

4. Transportation : A person with such a life (and temperament) needs little running here and there in search of entertainment or adrenaline rush. Use bicycle.

5. Hobbies : Plenty. Read the greatest minds of the world – better read those who are dead. Read the living ones with caution. In the evening, after a fulfilling days work, open a bottle of wine and call the greatest of musicians of the world to enrich you. Recommend : Bach.

6. Education of Children : Homeschool them. Tend the plants and the children. Both are same in terms of their growth. Give them open space, sunshine and water. Rest is not in your hand. Every man has a destiny. For a change, you can send them in a school for few months. They would not go second time.

7. Pets : Keep some pet. Keep a cow – it will give you the best nutritional drink for decade : Milk. Prepare all else from the milk. Keep a dog, a cat, few chickens. If you have a pond, keep some duck. If you observe them swimming, you will find a strange watery coolness inside you.

8. Security : The price of freedom is poverty. Be poor but not squalid. Let the neighbours know that you have a kingdom which is not in some bank’s computer thousand miles away but in you and within you. Share and Enjoy.

9. Holidays : A Life led this way does not need a holiday as generally people need.

10. Vocation : An unexperimented Life is not worth living. Experiment everyday.

11. Medical Support : You wont be needing anti-depressants, drugs for respiratory illness, drugs for sexual dysfunctionality, stress related syndromes and psychoses. For other maladies, please note that you will die one day.

Afterthoughts

Irecollect that in Ancient Rome there was a concept called Private Citizen. Many were very capable people and they served the Republic or Empire, depending on perspective, quite well. I am sure, at the end days of the Republic, many just withdrew and slipped away. They reasoned that the system merited less and less attention and care and was beyond repair. It had to be re-newed and any renewal needs a complete, overwhelming collpase.

Many such capable people, across the globe find themselves in the same mood. They find that the current system merits less and less for its perpetuation and this slipping away will hasten its collapse.

A growing number of men and women are not mouring. They are aware of the inner law and the opportunities in the new age. Most are clung by an unholy attachment (মোহ in Sanskrit) to the corpse. And the most dubious, most venal are selling the limbs of this corpse as a profit to the Unwashed.